Kristin Palitza

CAPE TOWN, Jul 21 2009 (IPS) – If developing countries want to succeed in improving their health systems, they urgently need to decentralise them and shift tasks from doctors to nurses and community health workers, said experts at the Fifth International AIDS Society (IAS) Conference on HIV Pathogenesis, Treatment and Prevention in Cape Town.
Professor Alan Whiteside, director of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, agreed: We probably have as much money as we re gonna get, so we have to spend more wisely.

He believes holding international organisations as well as national governments accountable for their spending on health is absolutely critical to monitor in what areas money was spent and e…

BALI, Aug 15 2009 (IPS) – Why is the popular drug Viagra so praised for its virtues, while the condom is vilified by conservative religious groups among others the world over?
Both are ‘external technological interventions that relate to sexual activity. They are among the most prominent tools in the area of reproductive health and sexuality.

But it is the gender and sexual ideologies behind them especially when combined with conservative religious forces and aspects of patriarchal culture that put them on opposite ends of the spectrum of public acceptance.

The result is a paradox that has huge implications for public health, especially in relation to the HIV and AIDS pandemic that is now entering its third decade and affects 33 million people worldwide.

A…

Athar Parvaiz

KATHMANDU, Sep 20 2009 (IPS) – As the Copenhagen Conference on climate change draws nearer, South Asia, which appears poised for severe threats from the impacts of climate change, faces a stiff challenge on two fronts.
For one, South Asia s member states home to half the world s poor need to convince the developed world to take steps toward the mitigation of future climate-related risks in the region.

For another, divergence of ideas among these countries over some crucial issues arising from the impact of this global concern on the region is a potential stumbling block to training some of the global climate change spotlight on South Asia.

The region will need to lobby hard during the Copenhagen summit in December to get the support they need, gi…

Letuka Mahe

MASERU, Nov 5 2009 (IPS) – Fifteen-year-old Ntsebeng Tlokotsi* sighs with relief as she is given 140 dollars. Along with it she receives a bag of maize meal and cooking oil. It is a government handout, and she qualifies for this only because both her parents are dead.

Ntsebeng Tlokotsi is one of the first 5,000 beneficiaries of Lesotho’s new child grant. Credit: Letuka Mahe/IPS

Tlokotsi s mother died four years ago, and her f…

Analysis by Neeta Lal

NEW DELHI, Dec 1 2009 (IPS) – As the global community observes World AIDS Day today, India is caught in a rancorous debate about a government scheme which mandates that all pregnant women in the country be tested for HIV so that its 1.2 billion people can have an AIDS-free generation .
The controversial scheme was initiated in October by the ‘Parliamentary Forum on HIV and AIDS , instituted in 2000 to help the government formulate public health policies. According to the Forum, (p)assing the disease to a newborn is a human rights violation. This should stop The newborn should not suffer lifelong without committing any sin as this is a human rights violation. Predictably, the scheme has stirred up a hornet s nest with activists raging that mandatory tes…

TOKYO, Jan 8 2010 (IPS) – Japan may be one the world biggest economies, but it is not immune to poverty.
Poverty has long existed in Japan and it is deteriorating in scale and depth dramatically in the past several years, says Dr. Aya Abe, senior researcher of the Department of International Research and Cooperation at the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research in Tokyo.

Today, many children are living under extraordinary levels of poverty in Japan, as data show, he says.

According to Masanori Matsumura, a primary school teacher for 30 years, a growing number of children in Japan today cannot even afford classroom supplies such as paints or craft materials. He adds, The expanding poverty is hitting the most vulnerable victims – children. <…

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 18 2010 (IPS) – Bad water kills more people than wars or earthquakes, declares Anders Berntell, executive director of the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI).
The devastating earthquake in Haiti last January claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people, making it one of the biggest single natural disasters this year.

But in contrast, some 3.6 million people including 1.5 million children are estimated to die each year from water-related diseases, including diarrhoea, typhoid, cholera and dysentery.

As the United Nations commemorates World Water Day next week, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says clean water has become scarce and will become even scarcer with the onset of climate change.

More people die from un…

Zofeen Ebrahim

KARACHI, Pakistan, Apr 22 2010 (IPS) – Already on dialysis, Sukhil Johal was told by her doctors in the United States that she needed a kidney transplant. But they also told her that it would probably take 10 years before a suitable one could be found for her.
Unwilling to wait that long, Johal headed for what was then known as the world s kidney bazaar: Pakistan.

That was in 2008. Johal, now 47 and working as a beautician in Britain, is healthy. But non-Pakistanis who may be in need of an organ transplant as she once did may now find it harder to replicate her medical experience here.

At least that is what many doctors and government officials are saying more than a month after President Ali Zardari signed the historic human organ and tissue tr…

WASHINGTON, May 24 2010 (IPS) – With only five years left to meet the Millennium Development Goals 2015 deadline for reducing child mortality, progress toward that goal may be coming faster than was previously thought.
Past studies have indicated many countries are not moving quickly enough toward the goal of a two-thirds reduction in deaths of children under five years old, but a new study sees an acceleration of this reduction in several low-income countries.

The study, published online Monday by the British medical journal The Lancet, finds that 7.7 million children under five are projected to die this year down from the 11.9 million who died in 1990.

While other studies have also pointed to decreasing child mortality rates, this study finds the most dramatic dec…

Mehru Jaffer

VIENNA, Jul 26 2010 (IPS) – The global conference on AIDS in Vienna last week will be remembered for Broken Promises Kill , a slogan echoed by a coalition of activists who had gathered from around the world.
Throughout the week-long conference, demonstrators clamoured for attention to the funding crisis severely impacting the global fight against AIDS.

It is important to bring the urgency faced by the AIDS crisis to as many people as possible, Dr. Nafis Sadik, United Nations special envoy to AIDS in the Asia and Pacific region told IPS as she sidled past a crowd of demonstrators.

This noise is to force people to recognise the crisis. It is not a party. It is a meet to confront AIDS, health and the failure of governments to live up to their respo…